


Firebird

by akitcougar



Series: We are the heroes (of our time) [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anna's life sucks, Baby Komodo, Bastion Prime, Citadel, Gen, Origin Story, Reasons why Komodo is the hero he is, Superheroes, Supervillains, There are too many assholes in this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 00:10:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3915838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akitcougar/pseuds/akitcougar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"The Firebird [...] is a magical glowing bird from a faraway land, which is both a blessing and a bringer of doom to its captor."</i>
</p><p>Anna Hsu, aka Phoenix, does the best she can. It's never enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firebird

__1986_ _

She watched from the sidewalk as the flames leapt and twirled, the billowing curtains turning to ashes before her eyes. She'd done this. She... she'd done this.

The sirens screamed. Sirens always screamed in New York, but they were deafening, the only thing reaching her ears. They grew louder and louder, racing closer to the burning brownstone.

Her little brother was tugging on her shirt. “Anna, Anna!” he was crying. “ _Big sister!_ ”

She knelt down so she was level with him. “It's going to be okay, Jack,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder to try and comfort him.

He wiped at his eyes. “Where's mom?”

Anna's eyes widened, and she stared back into the fire. The firetrucks screeched as they stopped on the street, and the firemen dispersed quickly. One of them rushed over to Anna and Jack and asked them if there was anyone else in the building. Anna said something, she didn't remember, and the fireman sent a suited member into the building to look.

Seconds crept by, then minutes. The other firemen were setting up a hose, waiting for the all clear so they could spray it down and prevent the flames from spreading to the other houses.

The fireman came out of the building, arms empty. He couldn't find anyone. The others started to spray down the house, the hydrokinetic allohuman with them guiding the water to the worst of the flames.

Anna pulled her little brother closer to her. They would find their mother when they looked again, once the fire was out. They had to find her. They had to.

* * *

_1987_

It was 5 pm on a Friday. A little boy sat on the school steps, his school uniform dirty and more than a little tattered. His backpack was likewise well used, bursting full of wrinkled papers. His black hair was haphazardly cut, and he looked exceptionally bored.

A teacher walked out of the building. He was the last person in the school aside from the custodial staff. He was startled to see a child still waiting to be picked up. He asked the boy if he should call a parent.

The boy looked up and shook his head. “We don't have a phone,” he said. “Anna says it costs too much.”

The teacher frowned. “Does your family know you're still here?” The teacher checked his watch. “Would you like a ride home?

The boy shook his head again. “Anna will come. She always does.”

After some back and forth, where the boy insisted this Anna person would show up, the teacher left to find a payphone to call the principal. A brief conversation later, where the principal told him to stay with the boy until he was picked up, the teacher walked back to the school.

The little boy was gone.

Well, at least Anna had finally picked him up.

He didn’t see the lone seven-year-old boy walking by himself.

* * *

_1990_

Her ten-year-old brother walked into the door of their crappy one room apartment, throwing his backpack onto the futon they used as a bed. She tossed the vegetables in the wok. She'd been lucky. Pork shoulder was on sale today, so her brother got to eat some meat for once.

“How was school today, Jack?” she asked in Mandarin, one hand on the burning wok and the other holding a steady flame underneath it.

“Fine,” he lied as he sat on a corner of the futon at the tiny table she'd managed to find.

She put all the food onto a plate for him and set the wok on the stove to cool down. She placed the meal in front of him and handed him the reused free chopsticks from the last time she'd been able to get take out.

“Are you going to eat any?” he asked.

“I already ate,” she lied. They'd gone through this routine almost every day for four years now. They could easily tell when the other lied, but they liked to pretend. She emptied the backpack out onto the futon and put her costume into it, slinging the bag across one shoulder. “I got a new book for you.”

Jack brightened up. “Really? What one?”

She took the book from under the bed. “ _The Count of Monte Cristo_ ,” she said, switching to English. “Sam recommended it, and I managed to pick it up when I was out earlier. Looks like an adventure book this time.”

“Wow, cool! Can you tell him that _Les Misérables_ was really good, even though it was really depressing too?”

“So that's why you were mopey last week. I'll tell him. Remember, lock the door and don't let anyone in until I get back.”

\-----

Dragon slapped her across the face. She stood and took it. His claws scratched her face, and blood started trickling down.

“Don't fucking fail me, Phoenix.”

“Yes, sir,” Anna said, stone-faced.

“You do the job exactly as I tell you. No side trips. No extras.” Dragon towered over her, baring his fangs to emphasis his point. His yellow eyes met her near-black ones.

“Yes, sir.”

“Get out of my fucking sight, chink,” he snarled.

She left the room as quickly as possible without upsetting her gang boss.

The gang's hideout, for lack of a better work, was the back of a crappy bar in Alphabet City, owned by a Nuyorican allohuman who only gave a shit about family, beer, and business, in that order. She tolerated Dragon's gang because they protected her siblings and patrons. If something happened to one of them, Luisa would kick the gang out onto the street, and they would be back to operating out of someone's squat house.

Sphinx stood up from his stool when he saw Anna, bloodied and bruised, walk out the back room. “Come on, 'Nix,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulder. “Let's get you cleaned up.”

She leaned into him, and he guided her over to the one bathroom the bar had. Some Bohemian wannabe was shooting something up her arm. One look from Sphinx, and the girl was running out.

“Damn druggies,” Sphinx swore. He set Anna down onto the toilet lid and took off his shirt, soaking it using the cold sink. He used it to wipe off Anna's face.

“Thanks, Sam,” she said.

“Don't mention it.”

A beeper went off, and Sam hit the reset button on the device clipped to his belt. He pulled out his bottle of medicine and swallowed a pill. “AZT break. Sorry.”

“Don't be,” she said, cleaning off the remaining blood with the soaking wet shirt.

“How's your brother doing?”

Anna sighed. “I'm pretty sure he gets picked on in school. All the money I make is going towards him, but Dragon keeps giving me less and less of a cut.” She handed Sam his shirt.

“No surprise there,” he said, ringing the shirt out in the stained sink. “He's been giving all of us less and less and wanting more and more. The asshole is saving up for something.”

Anna stood. “Yeah, well, he needs to either clue us in or just get it over with, or I might try to find a different gang. My brother needs to eat.”

Sam looked like he wanted to say something, but Anna left.

* * *

_1991_

Dragon had called a full gang meeting. The cuts he'd given Anna had healed into pale pink scars. He stood at the head of the table, wearing the “samurai” sword he called a family heirloom. Anna knew you could buy an identical one in Chinatown. She didn't say anything. It wasn't worth losing her only income over.

On the table in front of him was a small box covered in a t-shirt. It was roughly the size of a cd player.Around the table, all the capes of the gang stood in full costume.

Anna wore her mask with fake feathers and her costume with flames stylized into wings on the back. Sam had his loose garb and headscarf, evoking a desert nomad from one of the comic books he'd given Anna's brother.

Leshi sat across the table from Anna. The tall, gaunt woman was covered in fungus. Everyone thought she was just a little crazy. She could change her own size from incredibly short to very tall, but she had apparently never learned what a bath was.

Hydra stood on Dragon's right. He could regrow any limb if he lost it. He bragged about regrowing his entire body from a head, but Anna was reasonably sure he was lying. Either way, he wore nothing more than a t-shirt and jeans.

Yaga was on Dragon's left. Her power had aged her rapidly, and though she was only four years older than Anna, she looked eighty. She was their tinker, and she could make anything out of common herbs and Leshi's fungus.

Fae floated up in the rafters, her bright green skin and golden hair stark against the dark ceiling. Jotun sat next to her, his shaggy white hair pulled back.

In the back corner, of course, was the Bogeyman himself. Barghest was the only gang member who could completely dismiss Dragon and choose to follow his own rules. His black mask with green lenses hid his face from everyone, and Anna knew nothing about him. That was nearly the most terrifying part about him, if it weren't for his fascination with his morbid “art.” Barghest liked to cut up corpses and arrange them on canvas.

Anna shuddered, and she returned her attention to Dragon.

“All of you fuckheads have been complaining about not getting your cuts,” he snarled. “Well, now you get to know fucking why.”

He tore the t-shirt away from the box on the table, revealing a mechanical thing with wires all over it.

“This is a fucking NCP.”

That perked up all their interests. The Neural Connectivity Pulse. Sam had said that it shut off the ability to use powers in an area. There were more fancy words in his explanation, but Anna had never been a bookworm in the first place.

“And we're gonna use it to fuckin–“

The room was plunged into a deafening silence as Dragon kept talking. Anna couldn't even hear her own heartbeat.

A knife flew across the room and buried itself into Dragon's skull. His eyes widened momentarily, and he fell backwards.

Barghest walked from his corner to take Dragon's place. Sound returned, but the only way Anna noticed was because she could hear him kick Dragon's corpse out of the way.

“Finally,” he drawled, his voice slightly muffled by the mask. The attention of the entire room was on him. “Thought I'd never get to shut him up.” He picked up the NCP and tossed it up and down. “Been looking for something like this for a while.”

“And what are you going to do with it?” Sam asked warily.

Barghest looked at him. “Sphinx, right? The faggot?”

Sam nodded, his eyes narrowing.

“Well, fag–“ Anna had the distinct impression that Barghest was grinning “–I'm going to do what I do best: havoc and chaos. And you all,” he said as he made a sweeping gesture to indicate the entire room. “Are going to help me.”

“Why should we?” Leshi asked, her voice more curious than angry. Really, the only person who would be upset over Dragon's death was Hydra.

“Because otherwise I will kill you and everyone you love.”

The matter of fact way he said that sent a shiver down Anna's back. She had to protect Jack. It couldn't be worse than working for Dragon, right?

\-----

She was wrong.

It had cost her.

\-----

Sam was not able to raise a kid.

He was slowly dying from a disease that had already taken many of his friends. He was still solidly involved in the allohuman gang wars. He had his own people to worry about.

At least, that's what he told himself as he dropped Anna's brother off at Bastion with a bag full of books and a letter explaining everything. Why she'd been in Dragon's gang, the change in leadership, the suicide mission Barghest sent her on. Everything he knew about the group funding Barghest's reign of terror, the shadowy Citadel. That was all he could really do.

Still, he couldn't help looking back, watching the little boy with newly growing scales and tears in his eyes being let into Bastion Prime by an older cape.

* * *

_2014_

Jack Hsu had once had a pile of old books on his desk. French classics, mostly, in both English and French, with an occasional Mandarin copy Anna had dug up in New York's Chinatown. It was the reason he'd become fluent in French while in school, purely so he could read _Les Misérables._ Sarah still laughed at him for being a polyglot, but knowing three languages to fluency was a good distraction from everything.

He'd given away most of the books, mostly to people who needed them. Bonecrusher had taken his last English copy of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ as a distraction while waiting for her trial to finish. Sarah had yelled at him for being soft. Jack had punched her, and she left on patrol in a huff.

Now, only _Les Misérables_ remained on his desk, in the original French. It was too personal to give away.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Things and people responsible for this fic:** 16 hours in a car over 2 days, Eurovision 2015 songs, elentari7, RENT, Les Miserables
> 
> This is a work set in a world loosely based on Wildbow's _Worm_ , and it uses some of the terminology of Wildbow's world until I can figure out something else. All characters are original, as are many of the concepts of the world.
> 
> Cast:  
> Anna Hsu - Phoenix (17 in 1986, 21 in 1990-91), Chinese-American, pyrokinetic  
> Jack Hsu - Komodo (6 in 1986, 10 in 1990, 34 in 2014), Chinese-American, pyrokinesis and scales  
> Sam - Sphinx (25 in 1990), African-American, turns stone and similar materials into dust  
> Dragon - racist bastard, Japanese, dragon-like features (Western dragon, claws, eyes, fangs, wing-like structures on his back) and flight  
> Hydra, Yaga - lieutenants in Dragon’s gang  
> Leshi, Fae, Jotun - members of Dragon’s gang, kinda “weird”  
> Barghest - Bogeyman, Black Dog, creates “dead zones” blocking perception of sound  
> Sarah Feller - Windsong (26 in 2014)


End file.
